“Networking Relationships of Temporal Dance Environments”
The Cypher is a spatial condition in hip-hop culture that is generated from a series of relationships between body, space, and time. This condition is inherently architectural as it utilizes bodies as a means of constructing a temporal environment. Breakdancing or b-boying/b-girling is a genre of dance that stems from the four pillars of hip-hop. The other three include emceeing, deejaying, and graffiti. The fourth pillar, breakdancing, utilizes the Cypher to host performances in an adaptable field. As a means to understand this construct, multimedia technology was used to document and capture data from performances at Verve Dance Studio. Through film and motion capture, performances in a time interval of minutes were processed into drawing sets to identify the unique relationships building up this threshold of architectural bodies.
The documentation of the Cypher serves to challenge architectural representation, in order to generate new methods of interrogation that are capable of analyzing social, cultural, and political environments. The drawings produced are transcriptions, meant to be expressive, that allow those perceiving the set to draw out their own interpretations. Gestures of the body are networked into a series of relationships with each other and the ephemeral qualities of space. These relationships are superimposed and assessed throughout ranges of time to visualize the constantly shifting spatial environment. The visuals will provide a correlation to understanding architecture through elements including ground, sequence, tension, boundaries, occupancy, and speed.